1.Network of Ecelllence: Structuring the Digital Ecosystem Knowledge/Research

Summaries of FP6 projects from the
"Technologies for Digital Ecosystems" (DE) cluster

1.Network of Ecelllence: structuring the Digital Ecosystem Knowledge/Research:

OPAALS

Open philosophies for associative autopoietic digital ecosystems

Project Acronym: OPAALS / Project reference: 034824
Organization name: LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Contact personname: DINI, PAOLO
Description
Objective:
Digital Ecosystems are emerging as a novel approach for the catalysis of sustainable regional development driven by SMEs. The two overarching aims of the OPAALS NoE are to build an interdisciplinary research community in the emerging area of Digital Ecosystems, and to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for Digital Ecosystems research spanning three widely different disciplinary domains: social science, computer science, and natural science.
The main claim that OPAALS makes is that in order to achieve sustainable digital business ecosystems of SMEs and software components we need to understand in depth the collaborative processes and ICTs that underpin the continuous creation, formalisation, and sharing of knowledge in the form of business models, software infrastructure for e-Business transactions, and new formal and semi-formal languages. Our strategy is based on the development of an Open Knowledge Space.
Because this process must be sustainable and scalable it must be recursive and self-reinforcing. It follows that OPAALS is the first step in a recursive, reflexive, and self-reinforcing community building process that will culminate at the end of the project with an Open Knowledge community of research and innovation inclusive of all the stakeholders of digital ecosystems but mainly of academic institutions and SMEs.
We will integrate the research outputs in automatic code generation, autopoietic P2P networks, and distributed accountability, identity and trust into the existing infrastructure from the DBE project. These technical and scientific research activities will be balanced by research in the role of formal and semi-formal languages in epistemic communities and in new Open Source models emerging in public and commercial projects. Finally, we will develop a unifying evolutionary framework for language in order to base the evolutionary and adaptation characteristics of the digital ecosystems on the main medium of social constructivism: language.
Start date: 2006-06-01 / End date: 2010-05-31
Web site:

2.Integrated Project developing the first core of the Digital Ecosystem infrastructure:

DBE

Digital Business Ecosystem

Project Acronym: DBE / Project reference: 507953
Organization name: T6
Contact personname: Andrea Nicolai
Description
Objective:
The overall objective of the DBE is aimed at proving Europe with a recognized advantage in innovative software application development by its SME industry, launching a disruptive technology paradigm for the creation of a digital business ecosystems for SMEs and software providers thus improving their value network.
An open-source distributed environment will support the spontaneous evolution, adaptation and composition of software components - which also embed business rules - and services allowing SMEs, that are solution and e-business service providers, to cooperate in production of components and applications adapted to local business needs.
This will allow EU small software providers to leverage the possibility of new distribution channels providing services at local ecosystems and extending their market reach through the DBE. Easy access and large availability of applications, adapted to local SMEs, will foster ICT adoption and local economical growth of innovation nodes. This can only be achieved with a vision leading to a paradigm shift: the complexity of distributed software production and the new forms of networked business require a multi-disciplinary approach based on biology, physics and social sciences mechanisms and models.
DBE transposes from living organisms mechanisms like: evolution, adaptation, autonomy, viability, introspection, knowledge sharing, selection, and will lead to emergence of novel architectures and technologies, business processes and knowledge. The DBE will change the way SMEs and EU software providers use and distribute their products and services. It will allow SMEs to link enterprise-wide external resources and value networks, and to allocate them based on their business priorities.
The DBE is based on the key finding that with such evolutionary and self-organising system Europe could harness the complexity of software production and its SME software industry could regain competitiveness.
Start date: 2003-11-01 / End date: 2007-01-31
Web site:

3.Specific Targeted Research Projects developing horizontal services to provide enhancements to existing infrastructures, with a focus towards the DE infrastructure

ONE

Open Negotiation Environment

Project Acronym: ONE / Project reference: 034744
Organization name: CREATE-NET (CENTER FOR RESEARCH AND TELECOMMUNICATION EXPERIMENTATION FOR NETWORKED COMMUNITIES)
Contact personname: TELESCA, LUIGI
Description
Objective:
The main objective of the ONE project is to enrich Digital Business Ecosystems with an open, decentralised negotiation environment and enabling tools that will allow organisations to create contract agreements for supplying complex, integrated services as a virtual organisation/coalition.
The project is especially geared towards SMEs, providing them with a trusted, secure and free of charge technological environment through which they can create the tactical and strategic alliances to pursue business opportunities and growth. To be competitive in Digital Ecosystems SMEs will need to develop alliances and collaborate to provide joint service offerings and also address large tenders.
Current negotiation platforms, such as Business-to-Business electronic marketplaces and Internet trading platforms are centrally managed, not fully trusted by SMEs and/or too expensive and hence not widely used by European SMEs today. Without the support of proper tools, SMEs cannot easily find trustworthy partners to provide services or be found themselves. Access to reputation information is not readily available and negotiations are time consuming. To solve these problems, a negotiation environment must be affordable, open, not centrally controlled, support the sharing of knowledge via flexible security and trust policies and be able to learn and evolve with the changing market conditions.
ONE provides such a solution via an open-source approach ensuring transparency and sustainability. By using the ONE environment all business players (SMEs, Corporations and others) will benefit from reduction of time to market and transaction costs. The ONE environment will also provide wider ecosystem benefits in terms of an increase in the number of participants; better negotiation performance and collaboration while creating new business opportunities.
Start date: 2006-09-01 / End date: 2009-02-28
Web site:

CONTRACT

Contract based systems engineering methods for verifiable cross-organisational networked business applications

Project Acronym: CONTRACT / Project reference: 034418
Organization name: UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA
Contact personname: WILLMOTT, STEVEN
Description
Objective:
As technologies for new generations of digital business systems have forged ahead, new and exciting applications have become feasible. However, along with this potential it has also become clear that very significant challenges remain in the need for rigorous analysis of possible execution behaviour and the need for business interactions to be underpinned by sound, binding legal agreements. The main aim of the CONTRACT project is therefore to provide innovative new solutions, which specifically address the need for sound software and business guarantees in digital business applications. In particular, CONTRACT will build on existing theories of software contracts to create new formal models and practical tools for use of dynamic contractual agreements in electronic business environments.
The results will make it possible to:
- specify electronic business interactions in terms of contracts,
- dynamically establish and manage contracts at runtime,
- apply formal verification techniques to collections of contracts in a digital business environment, and,
- apply monitoring techniques to contract implementation to help increase confidence in business infrastructures.
The contract based approach promises to be a significant breakthrough in the formal specification and verification of business software systems since it raises the level of abstraction at which verification methods can work from detailed execution code to obligations, commitments and rights. Project results will include publicly available theoretical models and a reusable contracting language specification, open source software components compatible with leading business environments and tools implementing innovative verification techniques that make it possible to check contract properties both at design time and run time.
The consortium includes 1 major industrial partner, 3 Universities, a research institute and 3 associated SMEs participating in distinct business case studies.
Start date: 2006-09-01 / End date: 2009-02-28
Web site:

4.Specific Targeted Research Projects developing enterprise networking applications (which could be installed on, or linked to the DBE infrastructure)targeting SMEs,

SEAMLESS(Construction + Textile sectors)

Small Enterprise Accessing the electronic market of the enlarged Europe by a smart service infrastructure

Project Acronym: SEAMLESS / Project reference: 026476
Organization name: UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI MODENA E REGGIO EMILIA
Contact personname: BONFATTI, FLAVIO
Description
Objective:
The SEAMLESS project studies, develops and experiments an embryo of the Single European Electronic Market (SEEM) network where a number of eRegistries are started up in different countries and sectors.
Distinctive features are:
- Addressing Craft & Trade (C&T) companies through the respective mediators (chambers of commerce, entrepreneurial associations, local development agencies, ASPs).
- Focusing on two sectors, Textile (TEX) and Building & Construction (B&C) that are relevant to C&T companies and present overlapping areas (e.g. fabrics for tapestry).
- Starting up experimental RRs in both EU-15 and new member states (NMAS) and establishing interactions between them based on a proper collaboration framework.
In adopting eBusiness solutions, the target companies present figures lower than those of larger enterprises and increasing at a slower pace. The situation in NMAS, where the percentage of C&T is even larger than in EU-15, is generally worse, with significant differences between countries. The SEEM vision is towards a web-based marketplace where companies can dynamically collaborate without cultural and technological constraints. The SEEM allows an objective comparison of profiles and offers of company of any size and location, and this could open the eBusiness space to the many small companies (providing high quality products and services at lower cost) that now risk to be left aside from the electronic market.
The main project activities are devoted to define a collaboration framework and proper business models, realise evolving sectoral ontologies, develop a technological infrastructure and a number of applications and services on top of it. Six eRegistries are experimented, in Poland and Slovenia (B&C sector), in Spain, Slovakia and Romania (TEX sector), and in Hungary (generic). The SEAMLESS project intends to provide an independent contribution to the Digital Ecosystem initiative and strictly collaborate with the relative cluster of projects.
Start date: 2006-01-01 / End date: 2008-06-30
Web site:

E-NVISION (Construction sector)

A new vision for the participation of European SMEs in the future e-Business scenario

Project Acronym: E-NVISION / Project reference: 028067
Organization name: FUNDACION LABEIN
Contact personname: ANGULO, JOSEBA INAKI
Description
Objective:
The future business scenario will be global, open and collaborative, dynamic and adaptive, frictionless and consistent. The main barrier SMEs have to face in order to exploit, adapt and migrate to this e-Business scenario is the lack of SME-oriented methodologies or tailored solutions.
The main objective of e-NVISION is the development and validation of an innovative e-business platform enabling SMEs to model and adapt particular business scenarios; to integrate all their enterprise applications and to incorporate legal, economical, social and cultural services, with the final goal of facilitating their participation in the Future European e-Business Scenario.
The main outcomes of the project are:

1. A specific SME-oriented e-Business Model formally described by a set ontologies.
2. A semantically enriched web service-oriented e-Business architecture providing modularity and integrability.
3. A set of business contextual services enabling SMEs to incorporate legal, social, economic, and trust aspects in their business model.
4. A number of semantic integration components facilitating the integration of the most common enterprise applications: Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relation Management, logistics, etc.
5. A range of Semantic Tools providing the necessary decision support for governing the behaviour and progress of e-Business, through inference processes.
6. An Open Source e-Business Platform integrating the previous elements in an efficient SME-scale Information System, open and configurable enough to be adopted by SMEs.

This Semantic e-Business Platform will be validated in the framework of four different scenarios involving SMEs of the Construction and Building industry.
The consortium is composed of 3 RTD organisations, 1 University, 4 ICT & consultancy companies, 4 SMEs and 3 Clusters of organisations from 5 European countries (Spain, France, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Poland) with the clear aim of incorporating and validating as much experience as possible.
Start date: 2006-01-01 / End date: 2008-12-31
Web site:

SATINE (Tourismsector)

Semantic-based interoperability infrastructure for integrating Web service platforms to peer-to-peer networks

Project Acronym: SATINE / Project reference: 002104
Organization name: MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY
SOFTWARE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER
Contact personname: PROF. DR. ASUMAN DOGAC
Description
Objective: SATINE aims to develop a secure semantic-based interoperability framework for exploiting Web service platforms in P2P networks for tourism. Quantified objectives achieved:

• Exploiting semantics for Web services in the travel domain: SATINE provides a component to wrap existing information resources to make them appear as semantically well described Web services. It provides an easy to use tool for SMEs to easily create Web services from their existing enterprise applications. The wrapped resources are able to exchange information with other Web services in a Peer-to-Peer network.
• Semantically enriching Web Service Registries: Currently, the main service discovery mechanism is the service registries like UDDI and ebXML. SATINE project enriches the UDDI and ebXML registries with mechanisms to store and access Web service semantics to facilitate the discovery and automated composition of complex Web services for travel.
• Semantic Discovery of Service Registries: In SATINE architecture the Web service registries are connected through a Peer-to-Peer network to facilitate their discovery performing semantic routing of the queries.
• Semantic Interoperability of Diverse Tourism applications: Although there are efforts to standardise the messages exchanged in the travel domain such as Open Travel Alliance, not every travel company can be OTA compliant. In SATINE, the interoperability of all sorts of Web services is addressed at the semantic level through ontology mapping.
• Semantic Web Service Composition Tool: The platform provides a set of tools supporting the semi dynamic composition of semantically enriched Web services.
• Support for SMES: Web services could not be registered to any service registry but simply made available through a Web site, especially by SMEs. SATINE provides a mechanism to facilitate automated discovery of services through P2P technology.

Use and Impact:

• Providing an easy to use tool for Small and Medium Enterprises to easily create Web Services from their existing enterprise applications including a component to wrap existing information resources to make them appear as semantically well described Web Services.
• Extending the reach possibilities of tourism enterprises by making their own semantically enriched web services available to others either through service registries like UDDI and ebXML or directly through the peer-to-peer network.
• Extending the life of existing software by exposing proprietary functions as Web services.
• Saving time and money by cutting of software development time by wrapping already existing travel information system applications as Web services.
• Allowing complex service composition exploiting the semantics of travel services.

Start date: 2004-01-01 / End date: 2006-06-30
Web site:

TOOL-EAST (Die-makingsector)

Open source enterprise resource planning and order management system for Eastern European tool and die making workshops

Project Acronym: TOOL-EAST / Project reference: 027802
Organization name: FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT FUER RATIONALISIERUNG
Contact personname: IMTIAZ, ALI
Description
Objective:
Tool and die making workshops provide critical support for industry by providing and designing customized mechanical components. It is estimated that within the EU these enterprises, especially the Eastern European, are mostly organized as SMEs. They do not have the financial and human resources for the implementation of complex ERP applications from the powerful software suppliers. Furthermore the functionalities of these standardized applications do not fulfil the specific requirements of the tool and die making industry.
The project Tool-East will provide a cost-efficient ERP application for tool and die making workshops on the basis of existing open source ERP applications. Within the project the open source application will be adapted and modified for the specific requirements of this branch. The new adapted and modified ERP application supports the efficient coordination of intra-enterprise order processing and strengthens competition and competitiveness of Eastern European SMEs. Primarily, orders management, work planning, resource allocation and CRM need to be optimised and linked together in a dynamic work environment. Moreover ERP applications are necessary for the electronic collaboration in dynamic business networks. To enable industrial cluster to e-collaboration the consisting process and data standards will be considered for the Tool-East project.
One main challenge of this project is to use open source technology for the development of an integrated business application for tool and die making enterprises with high performance regarding availability, safety and maintainability at the very onset. Strengthening the open source initiative in general and particularly in this field of business opens an enormous potential for SMEs. Since demands for business software from other branches with specific SME structures are predominantly comparable, results from this project can be transferred easily, so that a large impact can be assumed.
Start date: 2006-01-01 / End date: 2007-12-31
Web site:

VISP (Internet Service Provisionsector)